Sunday, April 15, 2018

"Fake news 2.0: personalized, optimized, and even harder to stop"

This is the March 27 T.R. story I was going for when Astro Teller jumped the queue and although we try to not link to the same source more than once per day exceptions are made.
From Technology Review:

Artificial intelligence will automate and optimize fake news, warns a technology supplier to US intelligence agencies.

Fake news may have already influenced politics in the US, but it’s going
to get a lot worse, warns an AI consultant to the US government.

Sean Gourley, founder and CEO of Primer,
a company that uses software to mine data sources and automatically
generate reports for US intelligence agencies via In-Q-Tel, the
intelligence community’s investment fund, told a conference in San
Francisco that the next generation of fake news would be far more
sophisticated thanks to AI.

“The automation of the generation of fake news is going to make it
very effective,” Gourley told the audience at EmTech Digital, organized
by MIT Technology Review.

The warning should cause concern at Facebook. The social network
has been embroiled in a scandal after failing to prevent fake news, some
of it created by Russian operatives, from reaching millions of
people in the months before the 2016 presidential election. More
recently the company been hit by the revelation that it let Cambridge
Analytica, a company tied to the Trump presidential campaign, mine
users’ personal data.

In recent interviews, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, suggested
that the company would use AI to spot fake news. According to
Gourley, AI could be used in the service of the opposite goal as well.

Gourley noted that the fake news seen to date has been relatively
simple, consisting of crude, hand-crafted stories posted to social media
at regular intervals. Technology such as Primer’s could easily be used
to generate convincing fake stories automatically, he said, and that
could mean fake reports tailored to an individual’s interests and
sympathies and carefully tested before being released, to maximize their
impact. “I can generate a million stories, see which ones get the most
traction, double down on those,” Gourley said....MORE